Alex Singleton is part of the Daily Telegraph's leader-writing team and is a contributing editor at the Sunday Telegraph. You can visit his personal site and follow him on Twitter.

Downing Street plans a retreat to the Left

I have it on good authority that Downing Street spent three weeks before Gordon Brown's holiday deliberating between two agendas for its autumn fightback. The choice was between "fairness" and "aspiration". And, foolishly, they chose the former, believing it would enable them to portray the Tories in the poorest light.

Expect to see even more of the over-complicated, interfering policies that Labour has so favoured and which simply trap people into reliance on the state. The problem for Mr Brown is that he is unlikely to gain any electoral advantage.

Such policies may please his party's backbenchers and trade union funders, but families, faced with food and fuel inflation, are now much less tolerant of Government proposals that involve spending their money. They have also become instinctively hostile to the current Government. And their scepticism over Government attempts to promote fairness will be entirely justified: research by the Sutton Trust shows that social mobility has not been increasing, despite the massive expansion of Government programmes.

Conversely, the Tories seem to be in tune with the public mood, promoting policies to help parents have more say over where they children are educated and make welfare promote work. Unlike Mr Brown who appears, in some weird left-wing way, to view aspiration and fairness as opposites, the Conservatives' support for aspiration is more likely to deliver both.